13 Oct 2016

A new, small member joins the Solar System family: after Makemake, Sedna, Eris and Pluto comes 2014 UZ224 - a dwarf planet 14 billion kilometres from the Earth and last in order of discovery among our “small” neighbours in the sky.
A group of researchers from the University of Michigan has identified a new extra small world through software used to update the catalogue of celestial bodies that gravitate around our mother star. Starting from the data acquired by the Dark Energy Camera, the bodies in motion were traced, revealing the position at regular intervals and by joining the dots, like in a dot-to-dot puzzle.

It took 2 years of work to find 2014 UZ224, a planet with a diameter of 531 kilometres that dwells in the Kuiper belt, very distant from the Earth and from the Sun, that takes 1,140 years to complete its rotation period. The research team hopes that the software will contribute significantly to the hunt for new, mysterious worlds, among which the dark Planet Nine, the presence of which is theorized to be on the edge of the Solar System.